LukasRos' Blog

Blog Changes: Yiid.it, Facebook Comments, Design

I’ve integrated the Yiid.it Like/Dislike button on my blog, so you can like and recommend my articles through all the social services supported by Yiid (currently: Facebook and Twitter) - or you can dislike them if you feel I only post crap …

The second change I’ve incorporated: I’ve dumped Disqus. Nothing against them, they’re a really great service, I just noticed that almost nobody used it. Most of the commenting on my blog took place on Facebook. Thus: The Facebook Social Plugin for Comments replaced Disqus. Let’s see who’s the first to comment on that …

Read More

How 1954 imagined 2004 … NOT!

Predictions about the future are rarely true. We still don’t have the flying cars that science fiction told us we’d have soon. But predictions didn’t always imagine more than we actually got, sometimes they imagined less. For example nobody thought of the computing power that an average “smartphone” has today.

Today morning I found this picture, which is supposed to be from 1954 and shows how a “typical home computer could like like in 2004”:

It was posted by German Twitter user @ennomane, was retweeted and soon became part of the toptweets_de. When I wanted to blog it, I wanted to find out the identity of the original poster. Good! Research prevents from spreading false information! Because by now this person had found out that this is not actually a work from 1954 but a hoax. About.com Urban Legends explains the hoax. If you understand German, you could read ennomane’s post “Twitter, die Hoax-Maschine”.

By the way, if you’re generally interested in future predictions from the past, you should check out Paleo Future. The blogs deals with “a look into the future that never was”.

Federated Social Web Summit

On 18th July, there was the Federated Social Web Summit taking place in Portland. This was an invite-only event for tech geeks involved in a lot of open technologies that I still owe you to explain. While I haven’t been there, I would like to link the coverage of this event on the blogs for you to read, if you are as curious as myself about it:

• Ivan Pulleyn from Janrain writes “Mapping the Future of the Social Web”. It’s a beautifully written piece centering around a story that was the background to the event: What is the piece of data we exchange when we want to connect with a person we meet? Is it phone, email, IM or something completely different?! Exciting question.
• Evan Prodromou writes his “Federated Social Web Summit Wrapup” on the status.net blog. It’s a detailled description of all things going on on this event along with conclusion and future plans. A good summary!
• Finally, David Recordon writes a short piece called “Standards are best served second” in which he states that all the technologies like OpenID, OAuth, ActivityStreams, Salmon etc. are not a means of its own but the important thing is to find the use cases and then develop technology for it.

Did I miss anything interesting?!

Open? What’s that?

Open is the opposite of close, what else?! Well, it’s not that easy. The technology crowd and web advocates have come up with a whole bunch of buzzwords. Open Source, Open Content, Open Data, Open Standards, Open Protocols, OpenID, Open Cloud, the Open Web … are you still following? Companies are bragging how open they are. Opening up, that means being transparent, allowing outsiders to look into things that are usually hidden from them. While non-profits and grassroots movements may develop so-called open technology for the good of everyone, companies will certainly look into how they really profit from opening up. Working with technologies and products that use the “open” label every day, I thought I should start a small series on this blog to solve the buzzword bingo and deal with potential misconceptions. So stay tuned.

Facebook and Skype

A few days back, I blogged this provoking question: Did Facebook sell our Data to Skype? Well, I found out that Facebook asks some of their members to import their Skype contacts. I haven’t seen the respective screen, but a friend commented on it on my Facebook wall, another person had sent me an email about it as an answer to this posting and I found it on Techcrunch as well. (By the way: This blog has a comment function. Of course you can contact me through other channels, but why not keep your comments along with the article for everyone to read?)

The girl from whom I had received the invite has confirmed meanwhile that she entered their Skype credentials into Facebook to import her contact list, so the invite displayed in the Skype alerts was coming from the same feature. She did not tell me any details but it was not like that she sent the invite on purpose (remember: we are already connected). I assume that Facebook makes sending invites the default option and either hides the opt-out or doesn’t provide any at all?! Anybody knows that?

Did Facebook sell our data to Skype?!

Recently, the blue Skype notification box popped out from my system tray. Previously I had only seen it when someone chose to add me on Skype, but this time it was something else:

An invitation to Facebook! How has this landed in my Skype?! In my Skype settings it says now that I can receive alerts from Facebook, but I don’t remember giving that option in the first place!

There’s also the next screen to show “my Facebook friends”, and this is the scary part:

I am already on Facebook but with a different email address, so there was no way for Skype to match my existing Facebook account. Therefore, the people listed there might be from my Skype contact list, but here they’re listed with their Facebook name, image and link to their profile! It seems that somehow Facebook must have allowed Skype to match the email addresses of their users!!

Has anybody else seen those alerts?! There’s something going on and I don’t know whether I “like” it …

Thank you!!

A huge “Thank you!!” goes out to all those thousands of people who have already gone to our site jadoos.com and filled the preregistration form! We never, never, never … expected this huge number! Our gratidute also goes to DEMO.com who made that possible.